Confocal laser scanning microscopy is a powerful and increasingly popular technique for 3D imaging of biological specimens. However the acquired images are degraded by blur from out-of-focus light and Poisson noise due to photon-limited detection. Several deconvolution and/or denoising methods have been proposed to reduce these degradations.Here we propose a wavelet denoising method, which turns out to be very effective for three-dimensional confocal images. To obtain a translation and rotation invariant algorithm, we have developped the 3D Complex Wavelet Transform introduced by N. Kingsbury. These wavelets allow moreover a better directional selectivity of the wavelet coefficients. We show on simulated and real biological data the good performances of this algorithm.

Confocal laser scanning microscopy is a powerful technique for 3D imaging of biological specimens. However the acquired images are degraded by blur from out-of-focus light and Poisson noise. Several deconvolution algorithms have been proposed to reduce these degradations, including the Richardson-Lucy iterative algorithm, which computes a maximum likelihood estimation adapted to Poisson statistics. Nevertheless, this algorithm tends to amplify noise. Other solutions exist which combine Richardson-Lucy algorithm and regularization (for example with a Total Variation constraint). In this report, we will concentrate on methods based on wavelet analysis, in particular on wavelet denoising methods, which turn out to be very effective in application to 3D confocal images. To obtain a translation and rotation invariant decomposition algorithm, we have developped the 3D Complex Wavelet Transform introduced by Nick Kingsbury. These wavelets allow moreover a directional selectivity of the wavelet coefficients. We show on simulated and real images the denoising results. This algorithm is then used for the deconvolution purpose.